Stupid UNIX/svn question

I decided to upgrade svn to 1.5. I used MacPorts because it seemed like the easiest thing to do. It worked fine, but when I type 'svn --version' in a terminal, it still says it's at 1.4.4. After poking around, I found that MacPorts had put svn in /opt/local/bin, while the system is looking at /usr/bin. Is there an easy way to make the newer version take precedence without manually deleting the old version? I'm afraid to meddle with things I don't understand.

Edit: As a temporary workaround, I told svnX to look in /opt/local/bin for the svn binaries, but I would still like to fix my system path issues. Also, svnX hasn't been updated in ages, and the only alternatives are the command line, or $60+ apps, as far as I can tell.